Vanguard - What went wrong? @ FoH

by Inauro, 2008-01-05 23:54:42

Bluesnews directs our attention to the Fires of Heaven forums where Vincent 'Teclisen' Napoli, one of the designers on Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, responds to the GameSpy article naming VSoH as the biggest disappointment of 2007. As with any opinion piece from a former (and possibly disgruntled) employee, you might want to take some of this with salt.

Anyway, enough of my blabbering. The most shocking reality that I don't think anyone really ever understood is that Vanguard was made (exclusively the design staff, I should say) COMPLETELY by amateurs. People who had been hired less than a week with 0 prior experience were tasked with designing entire newbie areas that shipped. People who had never produced a game in their life were asked to fix a 40 million dollar fuck up. People with no experience were asked to fix the item, diplomacy, ability, content, quest and pretty much every system in the game.

The game that exists now was designed in a single year by people with 0 experience. If that sounds too vague think of it like this: about 1 year from release we had 0 quests in the DB because the tool didn't exist yet. When I decided to split the team there was over 30,000 quest object entries. Yeah, explains a lot doesn't it?